How Much Storage Space Should a Gaming PC Have?

Imagine this, you sit down ready to download a new release and get ready to play it that night. You hit download only to realize that you are 5GB short of having enough space on your drive. I have good news and bad, the bad is you are going to have to delete that 5GB indie game you’d say you would play but never got around to it. The good is that there are price competitive, economic, and efficient drives useful for expanding your system's storage.

So, how much storage should a custom built gaming PC have?

Generally, you should have more than 1 Terabyte (TB) of storage space in your gaming PC.

But honestly, it depends on how much gaming you do. If you're playing the hottest, AAA games on the market, you'll need a lot more space than if you play smaller, indie titles. Even then, downloading tons of smaller games fills your storage drives faster than you realize.

Here's a breakdown of how much storage space your gaming PC needs and some considerations for the types of storage devices.

Triple A games and ever expanding storage requirements 

Before releasing a game, the developer usually recommends certain system specs including the game's storage requirements. In the past decade we have seen the number of gigabytes needed gradually go up. In recent months, the push for more reliable compact code has made games like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, go from almost requiring the entire default 500GB hard drive on PS4s to just over 30GB on all relative platforms minus season expansions.

What does Apex recommend?

At Apex Gaming PCs, we use a variety of storage solutions in different configurations to give you the best advantage for your system. We suggest having 1TB of storage minimum if you plan to play 10 of the top rated released games of the past three years. Buying either 2 500GB NVMes (if your motherboard supports two slots) or two conventional 500GB SATA SSDs, one dedicated for the operating system and other programs and the other solely for games, to work well for increasing your PC’s storage capabilities.

We use a multitude of brands like Seagate, Teamgroup, Samsung, and Sabrent that offer a variety of storage types like Hard Drive Disks, Solid State Drives, and Non Volatile Memory Express. When picking storage, the type is just as important as the size. Let's go through the types of storage options available for the average gamer.

HDD (Hard Disk Drive)

Hard Drives are one of the most dated forms of storage in conventional computers in the last 30 years. However, much like film in the late 90s, the technology of hard drives has been refined and researched to a point of mass innovation. While they may have their downsides, hard drives remain a prominent workhorse for storage solutions in the data industry and gaming world. Here are the types of Seagate hard drives we use at Apex. Typically you would use hard drives for higher file sizes and programs that don't rely on quick loading time. This means that having multiplayer/online games on a hard drive will give you a loading disadvantage.

SSD (Solid State Drives)

Solid states offer a more conventional experience to the types of speeds expected from storage solutions. SSDs bridge the gap when it comes to read and write speeds. Only in recent years have SSDs become more reliable and cheap to produce and get into the hands of consumers coming into the $45-$65 range making SSDs and Hard Drives competitive in both aspects. The main benefit is that SSDs reduce loading time. But, they're not as reliable in durability when subjected to read and write cycles like hard drives.

NVMe (Nonvolatile Memory Express)

NVMe is a more recent innovation of the SSD allowing direct integration into the Motherboard allowing for even faster read and write speeds.In most cases an NVMe can quadruple the read and write speeds of conventional Hard Drives and SSDs. That said, you can expect to pay double for these types of solutions than conventional storage like SSDs and hard drives.

Conclusion

No matter what type of storage you decide on, you should have a minimum of 1TB of storage space in your gaming PC if you want to store all your games at once. At Apex, we offer everything from efficient space saving drives to multiple hard drives, SSDs, or NVMes in a single system in our high end Apex Carbon and Extreme. We hope to solve all of your storage needs whatever they may be!

Written by Will Wilson